Der Vaterland

Why live overseas?  In the midst of day to day life, It’s easy to forget just why I chose to leave all my safety, savings, cars, yard, personal space, friends and family behind and try out a new country.  This weekend I had a great reminder of one of the key benefits: experiencing new cultures.  My pal Juergen, who I wrote about way back at the beginning of the MBA, is from Germany, and was kind enough to take me on a brief tour of his home this past weekend.  Specifically, he is from Mömbris, a small town in the Aschaffenburg district in the Regierungsbezirk of Lower Franconia in Bavaria, Germany, or put more concretely, he is from the the place where oompah bands, big beers, sausage, lederhosen, and most other stuff that we foreigners think of as “German” come from.  This suits me quite well.

Autobahn

Juergen lives in London, but had been working in Freiburg all week, and I flew into Frankfurt, where we met.  We got a spiffy little BMW hatchback, and zipped off to Dusseldorf to visit Daniel, another MBA.  The Autobahn is pretty famous: everybody knows that this is the freeway with no speed limit.  People go either normal freeway speed on the right side, scary fast on the left side, or fighter jet speed so the scary fast people have pull over to the right and get out of the way.  The fighter jet thing was kind of hard to believe.  We would be doing a jaw grinding 90, and these fighter jet dudes would bear down on us and just blow past.  Just watching them made me feel sort of dizzy. 

 

Dusseldorf

We got the Daniel’s house in the mid evening.  His apartment is HUGE by London standards… room for a big screen TV, a big deck, dining room table, the works.  It’s in this old factory that now has been converted to housing, and so is kind of rustic in a hip sort of way.  The best thing about Daniel’s place is that there is a raised sleeping pallet which can be lifted up by an electric winch, revealing: oh yeah, you know it… a hot tub!  Total Austin Powers action, really funny.  I’m sure Daniel has put this to good use.  That night we all went out with Daniel’s buddy Marco, who is doing a PhD at the local university.  The night was spent in classic MBA style: drinking way too much at clubs with loud music, chatting to random people, and watching my buddies get shot down by girl after girl.  I was (once again) sorely underdressed.  I only brought running shoes and t-shirts, not the dress shirts and shoes that most euro clubs require.  This was dumb of me, I should have remembered, but the guys managed to squeak me in to the clubs one way or another anyway.  We came home at 5:30 AM.  That makes me tired again just writing it.  After breakfast we split for Erlangen, where Juergen’s fraternity is.

 

Juergen, Daniel, Marco

 

 

Germans wear nice shoes, Americans wear shitty ones…

 

Erlangen

This is the town where Juergen’s fraternity is located.  It’s where the Friedrich Alexander University is located, although for complex reasons, he actually studied at another University, but became a member of a fraternity at this one.  Fraternities in Germany are in some ways similar to those in the states (dudes in big old house, lots of beer, new members have to do all the shitty work, etc.) but in at least one way, they are TOTALLY different, and that way would be the sword fighting.  By sword fighting, I mean actual dudes with armor, fighting with actual swords, actually cutting the shit out of each other and getting big gnarly scars… and here is the important bit:  big gnarly scars on their unprotected faces and heads.  Does this sound more interesting than the phi delta gamma beta whatevah guys at your school?  I bet it does.  The basic run down on the sword fighting is this: the fraternities date back to the end of the 18th century, when people actually did wear swords, got into duels, etc.  To join a fraternity, you had to fight someone from another fraternity, and if you got a scar on your face, it was a sign of character, toughness, etc.  This tradition continues today, and is apparently unchanged from the 1850s.  The duelers wear chain mail shirts, heavy leather gloves, neck armor, and these armored goggles with a metal nose plate.  This keeps you from getting cut in the chest, neck, hands, eyes or nose.  Then, they stand across from one another with both feet facing forward and one had behind the back, and swing the swords at one another’s heads.  A round of fighting consists of four swings of each sword, with the swords held above the head.  Then, the duelers are stopped.  Then, there’s a break of a few seconds and they start again.  This goes for up to 30 rounds, or until someone is cut really badly and the match is stopped.  You can end up in a fight one of two ways: (1) you do one as part of a organized bout so as to be accepted into the fraternity, or (2) you get someone angry enough at you that they take their business card, rip it, and hand it to you, which means that you are challenged to a duel.  Apparently these frat boys never get into fist fights, but if they get really pissed off at someone, they will hold a duel.  If you are a crappy dueler and you get challenged, a senior guy in your house can do the fight for you.  In either case, people are going to get slashed up, and it’s a pretty serious deal.  I got to see the practice room with all the practice targets, helmets, swords and etc.  Juergen even dressed me up in the gear for shits and giggles.

 

 

no caption could really do this one justice

One of the chief pastimes of all students is drinking beer, and these guys are no exception.  I made sure to help as much as I could in this regard.

 

 

I think this stuff was called pils… sort of lagery

 

These guys predictably live in a big old 19th century house with tall ceilings, a bunch of formal rooms, and lots of dark wood.  There are little pictures of every member ever on the wall, but for the guys who were in before photography, there are these little silhouettes.  There’s some kind of a thing about wearing these little captains hats and tricolored sashes, but I forget exactly what that’s all about.  The dudes smoke constantly and from what I can tell pretty much drink constantly as well.  One of the rooms is a bar, and this is where I was first exposed to the singing traditions of the house.  They have these little leather bound books with metal studs on the covers that have all sorts of Germanic student drinking songs in them.  The senior guy in the room kept yelling “silencium” which I guess means silence, and then would tell everyone to open their books and sing.  I managed to catch one of these on video with my phone. 

 

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUm5RNkN630)

priceless

Nuremberg is Nürnberg

The next morning we got up and went to a beer garden, where I drank a big beer, and ate a huge pork knuckle with a giant potato dumpling.  In the interest of not torturing Juergen in the car on the way home, I skipped the sauerkraut.  After lunch, we went to Nürnberg, which people in the US tend to call Nuremburg, this is where the Reichsparteitagsgelände, or Nazi Party Rally Grounds was.  There’s a very famous war movie of a statue of a giant German eagle holding a swastika being blown up, and that was at the Reichsparteitagsgelände.  This is also where the big Nazi rallies were held, and where the big famous book burnings were, etc.  Today, most of the grounds have been turned into parks, so I doubt those old Nazis would even recognize it today.  This is also where the top Nazis were prosecuted by the victors after the war.  This is a grim museum, but I was glad to get a chance to see it, as it’s an important historical site.  Juergen gave me a lot of extra details on artifacts and photographs in the museum, so it was a very instructive visit.  After, we wandered around the old town center, which was pretty cool.

 

Mömbris

On the way back on Monday, we stopped for the second time at Juergen’s grandparents’ place, which is out in the hilly countryside of Bavaria.  This area is just gorgeous with lots of trees and little fields and farms, sheep, orchards and vineyards, it’s quite idyllic.  Grandpa actually fought in the war, just at the end.  Apparently he was a 14 year old anti aircraft gunner in the last days of the war.  After the allies overran his emplacement, he rode a bike with flat tires some 200 miles home.  Grandma and Grandpa were very kind to me, and fed me lots of tasty Bavarian lunch: sausages, cold cuts, terrine, home made cakes, etc.  All very good stuff, right up my alley.

 

Juergen and his grandparents

 

country lane outside their house

 

some things are the same everywhere you go

 

On Germany

I found Germany to be a pleasant, leafy place with nice little towns, great food, and an admirable dedication to beer drinking.  They also really dig the pork products, and I can’t argue with that at all.  I definitely need to go back!

the scorps

Juergen is taking me on a tour of the fatherland today.  I woke up at 6AM with Can’t Live Without You by The Scorpions running on a 6 second loop in my mind.  Now it’s 9:30 and Big City Nights is running on a 2 second loop.  I’m screwed.

 

Athenaeum Club

Shelby is back in town, and so we went to dinner at the club.  Originally this was supposed to be at the Oxford and Cambridge club, but when we got there, it was closed for the summer break.  On the door was a list of “reciprocal” clubs, which are basically clubs that let you use the facilities if you are a member of the Oxford and Cambridge club.  There is a long list of clubs around the world that are reciprocal to the O and C, but during the summer break, apparently there are a bunch of local London clubs that are temporarily reciprocal.  This is cool, because you don’t normally get to go to these, and many are pretty interesting and historically significant.  So, tonight we picked another Pall Mall area club from the list: the Athenaeum.  This turned out to be a good, if totally random call.  The building is really neat, done in Neoclassical and dates to 1824.  It’s right around the corner from the The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, and actually pretty close to the O and C too.  It’s a bit nicer inside than our club, if also a bit smaller, with lots of classical statues everywhere.  Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Franz Liszt, Winston Churchill, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, WB Yeats, and Richard Wagner were all members here.  Apparently the queen mother liked to have get togethers here back before she died.  This is totally NOT the sort of place they let recently emigrated Americans into, unlike the O and C which is pretty much for graduates with a pulse.  You’ve got to be a hot shot Londoner or a serious arts player to get in here, so it was cool to get the opportunity.  We got a look at their library, which is super cool, if quite a bit smaller than ours.  It has the two story ladder and catwalk deal that you see in movies, and so it has floor to ceiling books, a really cool effect.

 

library – someday I’ll have one of these!

 

The porter who showed us around the club picked out early on that we were from O and C, and kept making a big deal about how much more exclusive this club was than ours while he was proudly showing us around, which was super funny.  Having people condescend to you for being lower status than they are is the TOTAL English experience, and it’s even more authentic/hilarious coming from a waiter with a goofy accent.  Funny funny place, London.  The dining room was typical of London clubs: big room with polished wood tables, candles, waiters everywhere, big pictures of severe looking old dudes on the wall, etc.  Although, this place actually has an outdoor patio for summer dining, which is really good since these places all want you to wear a jacket and tie while you eat.  I had dover sole, and Shelby had calves liver, which I thought was pretty burly of her.  She told me all about her ill fated move to Dallas (lasted only two weeks) and some drama with a dude she’s been seeing.  I feel a bit bad that her big move didn’t work out, but I’m mostly glad that she’s back, it’s nice having the Shelbs around.   After dinner we went up to the lounge and had a few drinks.

 

lounge – we sat waaaay down at the far end

Shelby found a book all about London clubs and proceeded to read the stories out loud in a really crappy fake pretentious English accent.  I kept shushing her and laughing while scarfing down a tasty 1970’s vintage Calvados.  Afterward, we walked our middle classes asses back to the tube station and went our separate ways home.

grandma comes to town

My mother came to visit recently and got to see her grand-daughter for the first time.  We took several little trips over 2 weeks, and had a blast.  Grandmas like new babies, and this one seemed to still be pretty excited even though this is her 7th.

train to polperro

Mom got here on a Friday afternoon, so I took the train out to Heathrow to meet her.  I came directly from work, so I was still in my suit and tie.  She thought this looked pretty funny and told me that I looked like a real dad.  Great.  We went back to the apartment and she got to meet Isa, which of course was a lot of fun for everyone.  We stayed the night at the apartment and got up really early the next day to catch a train to Cornwall.  Actually, the train went to Plymouth which is is Cornwall, and also happens to be the place from which the Pilgrims departed England for North America.  These people were religious nuts who were being kicked out of England.  Of course they thrived in North America and their crazy ideas have since defined the moral tone of our country.  There’s something else for which we Americans can be resentful of our erstwhile English overlords: couldn’t the king just have just burned them at the stake or something?  Oh well, too late now.  Plymouth itself is a big run down, but does have a neat old town and harbor.  This was the baby’s first long train ride, 3.5 hours, and she did fine, sleeping most of the way.

early early early at Paddington station

luggage…

 

baby on a train!

 

From Plymouth we rented a car, and drove out to our rental house near Looe.  Looe is an old fishing village that has sort of become a crappy English holiday town: lots of dudes with shaved heads and tank tops with bad tattoos and bulldogs out walking with their rough looking wives who are smoking and pushing strollers while eating chips.  The place is supposed to be quaint, but it’s really just kind of shitty.  I was bummed out by Looe to be honest.  The area just outside of town is quite bucolic and nice however, and Reba had found us a really cool house in this area, way up on a cliff overlooking the ocean.  The view from the cliff was lovely and in some ways, reminded us of Santorini.  We had planned lots of little day trips, but as it turns out, vacations with babies are quite different from those without babies.  Getting going anywhere is a fairly big production, and needs to be timed carefully to avoid meltdowns.  So, we ended up staying in the house quite a bit, which was fine with me, because I could lay on the couch reading, looking out over the bay, drink an ice cold Stella and chill with the baby all at the same time, which is pretty much Ean heaven.

 

the good life!

 

I got a lot of reading in over the trip.  I banged through a few economists, a biography about Sonic Youth and an analysis of the letter writing relationship between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, which was pretty great.  Jefferson was kind of a nut, and seemed to believe that people should rise up and violently overthrow their governments every few years.  That aside, there were a lot of great ideas moving between these two guys, with interesting ideological conversations played out against a backdrop of a pretty crazy period in history.  This is a nice companion to the Portable John Adams, another book I’ve recently read.  Good shit, Maynard.  I also got a chance to write some songs, and worked out a way to play guitar and rock Isa’s car seat at the same time with my foot.  It definitely put her to sleep a few times, which reminds me of a few Birdbath shows from back in the day. 

 

captive audience

Driving around the area, we came across a neat little town that our cabbie in Plymouth had recommended to us: Polperro.  This place was way more my speed than Looe, it had a medieval waterfront stuck down in a deep valley, beautiful sea views, a bar with microbrews, and a really great fish restaurant, Nelson’s.  In my experience, this is a rare thing in the UK, because to most people here, “fish” = deep fried cod with chips and mushy peas.  Not that I don’t like a bit of fish and chips now and again, but there really is a lot more to seafood than that.  So, finding a place that did Cornish fish stew, fresh scallops, Atlantic lobster, and had a premier cru Chablis really turned my crank!

 

lunch in Polperro

Polperro Harbor at low tide

 

check out the angles on that window

 

river tour with mom

The trip back to London was nice, and after a week of chilling with books, beer, baby and guitar, I was feeling pretty relaxed.  St John’s Wood is a bit on the crazy side recently, because Lord’s Cricket Ground is a few blocks away, and the English are playing the Australians for “the ashes”, which is a complicated rivalry thing that I don’t really understand but also don’t really care enough about to figure out.  Anyway, the neighborhood is loaded with guys wearing crimson and gold ties in support of their team (whichever it is) and the neighborhood pubs which are usually empty and peaceful are basically overflowing with loud drunk sports people (in ties). 

A few months back, Kaysa set up an outing for Alan, our friend from SBS who was going to get married soon.  Al is not the typical guy, so the typical stag party with strippers and shots and whatever didn’t really seem to suit him.  So, Kaysa came up with a swell day that included a boat tour of the Thames in London, a kite festival, a micro brewpub, and dinner at some kind of weird German restaurant with accordions and lederhosen all over the place.  I found out on this outing that not only are Germans as weird as I initially suspected, but also that a boat tour of the Thames with a stop in Greenwich is a really great day out.  So, I took my mom down to the pier at Westminster, and got us on a tour.  There’s a lot to see from the river down there… the tower of London, Parliament, the London eye, the golden hind, the tower bridge, the place where they used to chain pirates us to be drowned by the incoming tide, etc. etc.  My mom really enjoyed all of this, and snapped lots of pictures.  We made it down to Greenwich by late afternoon and stopped at the totally awesome Meantime Brewing brewpub, the Greenwich Union.  Micro-brewpubs are kind of rare here, so a visit to this place is a real treat for someone from the pacific northwest.  After a late lunch, we walked up to the royal observatory which is on the top of a hill in a huge park, and you can stand exactly on zero degree longitude.

 

mom at zero

 

(not) visiting the queen

My club arranged a special after hours guided tour of Buckingham Palace, and the event happened while mom was in town.  To be entirely honest, this is the exact same tour that any tourist can get as long as he buys a ticket and turns off his cell phone, but I think my mom enjoyed telling her friends that she might bump into the queen anyway.  The Palace is kind of what you’d expect: big, fancy, lots of art and gold stuff, has a throne room, etc.  It seemed pretty well maintained to me, but according to the economist, the place is falling apart.  It was fun anyway, and I think my mom got a big kick out of seeing the collection of royal dresses that are on display there, so it was worth it.  We finished the tour with a glass of champagne on the back patio and then it was off to the club for dinner.  Total London stuff… a bit silly, but lots of fun.  We didn’t see the queen though.

 

la Coruña

I really wanted to take my mom to Spain on this trip as well.  Our normal M.O. for trips over here is to go to 2 separate places NOT in London, for 1 week each.  This keeps things relaxed without too much running around but also gets me to somewhere a bit different from here.  This time, with the Palace tour, it was going to be hard to squeeze in a second place without it being London, and since I have all the London I could ever want and we only had a few days left of vacation, I tried to find somewhere that is close by to visit.  A friend of mine at work is from a town called La Coruña which is on the north coast of Spain in a region called Galicia.  It’s only a 1.5 hour flight from Heathrow, and is near a town that my mom really likes, Santiago De Compostela.  So, I booked some tickets to Coruña and some reservations at their nice hotel, the Finisterre.  Arriving was a bit weird, as there had just been an ETA terrorist bombing that day in a nearby town (Burgos), so the immigration guys had a field day with my passport.  The problem with my passport is that with all the travelling I’ve done in the past few years, and the greedy passport page habits of the UK visa people and the Chinese government, I’m all out of space, and it’s pretty difficult to tell where I’ve been because of all the stamps stamped on top of each other.  So, I had to fill out some explanations of where I was staying, how long I would be there for, etc. and have some conversations that stretched the limits of my high school Spanish.  Eventually we got through, but it took maybe 20 minutes to convince them that I really was a tourist.  Funny!  Once we got settled at the hotel, things were just fine… a quick walk put us at the Plaza of Maria Pita, which is the typical Spanish grand plaza with restaurants and people out for walks, etc.  We found a nice little seafood tapas place, and dug into some great Spanish dinner.  The Spanish pace of evening is something I really enjoy: strolling around, finding a place to eat, wine, tapas, more strolling, the dinner process takes hours and hours, but isn’t tedious, just relaxing.  Plus the food is AWESOME.  The local Orujo is a joy as well, the perfect after dinner drink.  There aren’t a lot of “sights” to see in Coruña, so we spent a lot of our time in this way, which is perfect for me, and seemed to go over well for mom too.

 

dinner Coruña style

 

We did take one day trip to Santiago de Compostela, which is an ancient pilgrimage town which has drawn people from all over Europe for centuries.  The big cathedral there is quite beautiful, and features a giant incense burner that is swung across the gathered pilgrims, apparently the original idea was to deodorize the stinky bastards after their long unwashed trip across the continent.  The cathedral also has a neat column where people repeated placing their hands over the centuries has worn a hand shaped indentation into the rock.  The first two times I was here, in 1987 and 1996, you could walk up to the column and put your hand into the grooves, which was pretty neat because of all the people before you who had also done this.  Unfortunately for us, but perhaps fortunately for the column, it is now roped off and you can only look at it.  This is probably for the best, I bet there are more tourists visiting that city in one 21st century summer than in 20 years of the 15th century, and this really neat relic could be at risk of falling apart if it’s not conserved properly.

handy…

 

We also visited the Santiago hotel where my mom and dad stayed when they first went to Spain in 1983, the Parador.  This is across the square from the cathedral.  I think that was cool for her.  It was certainly cool for me because I ate some killer Jamon Iberico.

 

mom standing on the cathedral steps with hotel Parador in the background

  

mom and the cathedral

looking out over the bay at breakfast

 

The last thing we did in Coruña was visit the old roman lighthouse at Finisterre (Latin Finis and Terre?), which has been standing since the year 2.  It’s had a LOT of changes since then, such as an entirely new roof structure and external walls added in the 18th century, but it’s still there, and makes a pretty good background for mom.  I walked up the stairs inside, and it was a a weird combination of claustrophobic because of the tight winding staircases, and agoraphobic because of the high tower with no railing.  Cool view though.

 

 

lighthouse!

 

All in all it was a pretty good trip.  Now, I’m back at work in my suit.